Internet Book Piracy Read online

  Authors should actually thank the pirates for helping to publicize their books.

  Absolutely not true either. In some cases, writers have chosen to give away all or sections of their books to publicize them—such as Cory Doctorow, a Canadian sci-fi writer and journalist who has offered many of his books for free through a Creative Commons download (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cory_Doctorow)—but that’s by their own choice. So if writers want to share their book, they can upload the book themselves. But no one else has the right to make that decision for them. While these free offers have gained some writers publicity, particularly when the idea of giving away a book for free was relatively new, generally the publicity value of free pirated books is nil, as Charles Sheehan-Miles notes in his article “Book Piracy and Me,” which is no longer online. I found this to be true myself. Despite many thousands of downloads, I never got a single call or email from an author, journalist, or broadcaster about any of my books they had seen on a pirated site. Moreover, as A. Giovanni notes in his article “Online Book Piracy: The Myths and the Facts,” which is no longer online, “Publishers establish their own marketing system … When books are stolen and resold or given away by thieves, the author and publisher are robbed of their strategy.”

  Information should be free and sharing is natural on the Internet.

  Yes, certainly, a lot of information is given out for free, including material in the public domain and assorted books, papers, and documents that individuals, institutions, and companies contribute to the mix. Also, Wikipedia and other sites that compile these materials are certainly doing a public service. However, if the information is the property of an author or publisher who chooses not to share it freely, then that isn’t offered for free. It’s the difference between someone who chooses to give away no longer wanted property by putting it in front of their house for anyone to take, and someone who decides to have a garage sale. In the first case, you are free to take what you want; in the second case, anything you take is stealing. Moreover, it shouldn’t be the responsibility of writers and publishers to spend their time tracking down their stolen property from hundreds of sites where it might be posted; anyone posting copyrighted material should have to ask for their permission to post it.

  If I buy a book, I should be able to share it with others; so why can’t I upload it on a file-sharing site?

  Here the big difference comes from sharing a physical object versus posting a file of a book that can be duplicated or downloaded hundreds or thousands of times. In the first case, a single object is passed around by friends, family members, or from a library. But sharing a file is akin to becoming a publisher of that book yourself and then giving it to others for free, or in some cases, getting money from those who download it, such as subscribers paying a premium for a multiple-download service. But this is publishing without permission and without paying any money to the original publisher, or to the author who has assigned the copyright to that publisher for the term of publication.

  Everyone’s doing it and you can’t stop it.

  As one writer commented in an email to me: “This has been a long ongoing battle for over ten years … but I fear there is little anybody can do about Internet piracy. It will always exist in some form. If you look hard enough, you can find pretty much anything … and books of all kinds. The huge corporations have not been able to stop it as a whole. There have been some arrests, some sites closed down. But there are always more cropping up with better security. Unless the Internet is policed … this is the way it’s always going to be, unfortunately.”

  Still another writer, Dan Graziano, commented in an article “Digital piracy cannot be stopped” (http://bgr.com/2012/08/06/online-piracy-authorities-struggle): “Each day more and more users are turning to peer-to-peer file-sharing websites … and online pirates always seem to be one step ahead of the authorities.”

  However, just because thousands if not millions of people are doing it, that doesn’t make stealing anything right. When people text on their phone while driving or cheat on their income tax, the authorities don’t look the other way, just because something has become common practice. And if you own a home or a car, you don’t leave your door unlocked, because the burglars are likely to get in anyway once they target your house or car. So individuals and the authorities do what they can to keep the criminals from committing their crimes, even though filing lawsuits, making arrests, getting convictions, and sending offenders to prison won’t stop the crimes entirely.

  In sum, despite the various arguments supporting piracy, it is a crime and a violation of copyright under civil law. Though little has been done to stem the piracy tide, the various efforts to stop it through criminal penalties and civil litigation will at least help to reduce the actions of the pirates to some degree, though an even more active effort is needed to go after the book pirates. Such an approach helped the music and film industry reduce the problem and ultimately develop low-cost alternatives, such as iTunes, Hulu, and Netflix, which have provided a legitimate way to get online content. Now writers and book publishing companies might do the same by ignoring the excuses and apologists for piracy, because these crimes and civil wrongs are costing writers and publishers billions of dollars in lost income. It is time to say stop the pirates and ignore those who would give excuses or apologies that encourage piracy to continue.

  CHAPTER 9

  The Damage of Internet Piracy by the Numbers

  DESPITE THE CLAIMS OF THE “researchers,” “students,” and other piracy explainers, defenders, and supporters, piracy has resulted in major damages. In fact, the fallout from the Sony hacking upheaval shows just how damaging a piracy attack can be; a hack to steal books, music, films, software, or anything else can readily turn into the theft of other information, such as internal memos, employee data, and financial records. So this is all the more reason why the battle against Internet piracy can reach far beyond just protecting individual works by writers and publishers from theft.

  While most pirating theft takes the form of uploading copyrighted material onto websites without permission, it could easily take the form of hacking this material from targeted computers, such as those of publishers or high-profile writers. Then the hackers could go even further to look for personal and financial information. We are now in the age of cyberwarfare, as shown by the hacker attack that has been attributed to North Korea. Two days after that, North Korea’s own Internet system went down, whether in direct retaliation from US hackers on the instructions of US intelligence operatives, or maybe they just went down. At this writing it’s hard to know—only that the Sony hack and the downing of the Internet in North Korea shows what is possible, whether to gain an advantage in war or in commerce. Writers and publishers can just as easily become the targets should piracy shift from illegal downloading, uploading, and website postings to directly finding files to pirate on the computers of anyone connected to the Internet in any way.

  But that’s a potential threat for the future. Here’s a look at the damages of piracy by the numbers. The numbers vary based on how the data is sliced and diced by different sources and for different time periods, but they present a frightening picture of the extent of damage to individuals and companies and to the economy as a whole. While most of this damage is to film, music, and software companies—who have taken the most aggressive stance in fighting back themselves or with the help of law enforcement—the numbers portray the devastation wreaked in the publishing industry, too.

  For example, in the article “Piracy’s Ripple Effect on the Global Economy,” Wayne Scholes, CEO of Red Touch Media based in Utah, outlines the way piracy spread from the music industry to affect all content creators.1 As he points out, approximately 2.4 million US employees, including technicians, editors, producers, and camera operators, make up the entertainment industry, which contributes approximately $80 billion each year to the US economy. But that number is “nowhere close to what it should be,” since it is estimated that 750,00
0 jobs have been lost due to online piracy.

  Such piracy has become rampant, with free online file-sharing services stepping in to fill the consumer demand for digital content since it became a mass market about fifteen years ago. And so now about 70 percent of online users don’t see illegal downloading as a form of theft. Rather, online “theft” has become so pervasive, especially of music and films, that many consumers have come to expect getting free content online. In fact, according to Scholes, “95 percent of online music downloads are illegal, and the average mobile phone, iPod, or tablet contains $800 worth of pirated content.”2

  The devastation to the music industry, beginning with the introduction of Napster in 1999, started the piracy incursion, like pirates getting a foothold on a spit of land and then spreading outward from there to undermine the economy of one country after another. As Scholes notes, before Napster, global music sales were over $38 billion. But even after Napster was shut down, music revenues continued to drop over the next decade, until 2012 when they went up 3 percent due to iTunes and Amazon providing a way to buy legal content for a small sum that provided a more convenient alternative to stealing it. Even so, the music industry’s sales are less than half what they were in 1999, since they are about $16.5 billion a year.3

  Likewise, the cost to the film and software industry is in the multi-billions, facilitated by the development of file-sharing services like BitTorrent, which permitted users to share larger files. For instance, in 2010, pirates downloaded over 17 million copies of James Cameron’s film Avatar, and even though some content distribution services like Netflix, iTunes, Amazon, and Epix have created a way to access films and videos legally, piracy has continued to make up a large percentage of the content online, costing the US economy about $250 billion a year. And this is not only the cost to the companies owning the content, but to the hundreds of thousands of people who lose their jobs.

  In another study called “Sizing the Piracy Universe” conducted by NetNames, a British brand protection firm for NBCUniversal in 2013, it was found that in January 2013, 432 million users infringed on copyrighted material, an increase of 10 percent from 2011.4 The study also found that 76 percent of the infringing users—327 million of them—came from North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific, where approximately one quarter of the Internet users in those areas—over 300 million people—infringed on copyright materials at least once.5 Another startling finding was that about one-fourth of the total bandwidth used by all Internet users—9567 petrabytes—was for infringing content.6 Or expressed another way, almost a quarter—23.76 percent—of all Internet traffic, apart from pornography, was infringing copy.7

  Still other findings by NetNames have shown the trend for peer-to-peer distribution systems to increase, while direct-download cyberlockers have declined. As Richard Verrier reports in a January 2012 Los Angeles Times article, “Online Piracy of Entertainment Content Keeps Soaring,” the Megaupload direct-download cyberlocker (the one famously run by Kim Dotcom who is still fighting the government) was closed due to the actions of international law enforcement. The result was that many other major direct-download cyberlocks closed or changed the way they operated to avoid a similar takedown. So the number of visitors declined by 8 percent to 149 million from November 2011 to January 2013, while the number of pages they viewed dropped 41 percent to 2.3 billion. But at the same time, the page views on the BitTorrent websites using a peer-to-peer distribution system increased, suggesting that they were taking up the slack as users switched from downloading to file sharing. As Verrier notes, in January 2013, these BitTorrent websites had 7.4 billion page views, up 31 percent from November 2011, while the video streaming sites increased 34 percent to 4.2 billion page views in the same period.

  While government officials—such as Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, co-chairman of the International Anti-Piracy Caucus—have agreed that online piracy has been weakening the economy, piracy has become so common in the entertainment field that some legitimate video-streaming websites are studying what the pirates are doing to better compete with them. For example, Netflix monitors the file-sharing platforms to see what is most popular to decide what to buy, since according to CEO Reed Hastings, some illegal file-sharing “creates the demand for content that is available on legal download platforms.”8

  While the publishing industry hasn’t been as hard hit financially as the music, film, and software industries, simply because publishing income is much less, the level of piracy for books, especially for best sellers, is huge, contributing to large income losses for both publishers and writers. For instance, a study of book piracy on Kindle conducted by PiracyTakeDown (www.piracytakedown.com), as reported by Shota on May 13, 2014, 63 percent of the top thirty bestsellers were pirated by being distributed over cyberlockers or torrent.9 And here are some more recent numbers from a Global Post article from April 2014:10

  • According to one of the biggest studies conducted by Musicmetric in 2012, the United States and Australia have the most pirates. The US had the highest number of downloads per country—more than 96.8 million downloads in just six months—while Australia had the highest number downloads per capita.

  • The US economy has been losing $12.5 billion in revenues and other economic measures each year due to online piracy in the music industry, based on estimates by the Institute for Policy Innovation.11 This number would be even greater if the other heavily impacted industries were included in the study—most notably the film, software, and publishing industries.

  • Over 146 million visits occurred each day at forty-three of the world’s digital piracy sites, such as RapidShare.com, in 2011, according to a report commissioned by the US Chamber of Commerce.

  • In the decade since the peer-to-peer file-sharing site Napster was created in 1999, music sales in the US dropped 47 percent to only $7.7 billion, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. In 1913, the most pirated musician was Bruno Mars, who experienced nearly 5.8 million downloads of his music, according to Musicmetric.

  • The computer software industry has been especially hard hit. About 42 percent of the software used worldwide was pirated in 2010, resulting in the illegal downloading of about $59 billion in software, according to a major Business Software Alliance study.

  • Some of the most popular films were also the most heavily downloaded. For example, the Game of Thrones season four premiere was downloaded illegally more than one million times, according to the piracy tracking website Torrent Freak. The most downloads occurred in Australia, followed by the United States and the United Kingdom. In 2013, the most illegally downloaded movie was The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, which was downloaded over eight million times, followed by Django Unchained and Fast and Furious 6, also according to a TorrentFreak report.

  • Another big consumer of pirated materials is Spain. According to an April 2014 study by La Coalición, a Spanish industry lobby group, 50 percent of the Internet users in Spain illegally obtained digital content, and 84 percent of the content consumed in Spain was illegal. The pirates were especially partial to films, followed by music, books, and video games.

  Finally, here are some numbers for ebook piracy developed by the web hosting blog “Who Is Hosting This?”12

  • The ebook pirate sites library.nu and iFile.it had an annual revenue of $10 million, until they were closed down in 2012.

  • Ebooks represent about 22.5 percent of books sold to consumers today, and 76 percent of the digital content for academic use is available for free from pirate sites.13 About 25 percent of all ebooks in the US are copied or downloaded for free, while 75 percent are bought and paid for. About 31 percent of ebook owners got their ebook for free, compared to the 69 percent who purchased all of their ebooks.

  In sum, as these numbers show, piracy is a major problem in all of the fields offering digital creative content. Even if something doesn’t start out in a digital format, such as a hardcover or paperback book, it can be readily scanned and become a
part of the digital universe. In turn, there are serious economic costs involved for individual writers and publishers and for the many jobs lost in these industries, due to the loss of income sustained by the companies, resulting in reduced operations. While individually, some writers may claim they have gained from their work being made available for free—such as blogger, journalist, and sci-fi author Cory Doctorow, and Paulo Coelho, author of The Alchemist, who was selling one thousand copies a year before he personally released a pirated Russian version that resulted in sales exploding to ten million a year—on balance, as these numbers show, piracy is a serious economic threat.

  No wonder even President Obama has expressed support for efforts to go after piracy. Obama nominated a new “piracy czar” in August 2014, Danny Marti, a copyright and trademark attorney in Washington, DC, to the Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator post, established in 2008 to coordinate the administration’s policy on intellectual property and piracy. Obama ultimately backed off from supporting the Stop Online Piracy Act of 2012, supported by the Hollywood studios and the MPAA to help shut down foreign websites and file-sharing sites that facilitate piracy, primarily of music and movies. He withdrew support because of the blowback from web companies and Internet freedom activists who felt the bill could restrict the web by destroying the fundamental openness of the Internet and prevent future Internet companies, like Facebook and eBay, from getting on the ground.14 A key reason for choosing him has been to show the administration’s support for a position that derives from the creation of the office in 2008 to fight piracy, a position considered increasingly important to support “the millions of workers who comprise the country’s $1 trillion copyright economy.”15

  This battle against piracy has become a major struggle of our times. A vast number of pirates are making available trillions of dollars of copyrighted material worldwide for free, undermining the incomes of millions of creative content developers and thousands of companies offering creative materials. At the same time, the forces seeking to prevent piracy are up against millions of users who are downloading, sharing, or purchasing pirated copyrighted materials and feel there is nothing wrong with doing so. For example, reflecting similar numbers in other countries, 70 percent of online users in Denmark indicated that they believe there is nothing wrong with piracy, according to a Rockwood Foundation Research Unit study.16